Tag Archives: email marketing advice

If you’re looking to send marketing emails that actually get read, there’s really nothing tricky about it; it’s simply a matter of providing your readers with a reason to open your message and see what you have to say. Of course, one tried and true method is to include discounts and coupons in every marketing message you send. While this is no doubt an effective strategy, there is a potential downside—namely, your company may not be able to afford big discounts on a regular basis.

Fortunately, there are other ways to make marketing emails valuable. In fact, there’s a growing trend of sending marketing emails with “sticky” editorial content—a trend that’s summarized in a recent Marketing Land article. “Today’s consumers (B2C and B2B) value content that goes beyond offers, promotions and product information,” the article says. “They crave useful information that speaks to the intersection of their lifestyle and brand values.”

The tough part is coming up with editorial content that truly does enrich the life of your reader—content that offers something really valuable. We’re here to help. Here are just a few ideas for your email marketing content, via the content creation pros at Grammar Chic, Inc.

Content Ideas for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Product guides. Showcase your products in special, curated collections—like a holiday gift guide. Example: Do you have a few products that are tailor-made for moms? Get them lined up to promote in a pre-Mother’s Day email.

How-to guides. Rather than showcasing your products, you could also showcase your expertise. Example: Do you own a plumbing company? Put together a quick, bullet-point guide to unclogging a sink, or troubleshooting a garbage disposal. Those are the kinds of everyday challenges that resonate with people—and it may get them clicking on your email message.

News round-ups. Within some industries, it makes sense to send out periodic collections of relevant news headlines. Example: One of our clients, a financial advisor, sends monthly updates on the stock markets, tax laws, etc.

Recipes. Again, this isn’t necessarily for everyone—but if you sell food, condiments, alcohol, or even cooking ware, you can show how your items work in action, providing your readers with seasonally appropriate recipes and meal ideas!

Outfits. An idea for clothing, jewelry, or accessory stores: Put together “outfit of the day” (or week, or month) emails, providing your readers with some ideas of how they can mix and match your various products.

Reviews. Offer product reviews, from your expert perspective. Example: If you own a used car dealership, you can write quick reviews of your favorite auto cleaning wipes, floor mats, or other accessories.

Write Emails That Get Read

Good content is the first step toward effective email marketing—though there are other considerations to make, too. Compelling subject lines and carefully targeted email lists also help. We can help you bring it all together. Reach out to the email marketing team at Grammar Chic, Inc. today for a consultation; you can reach us at 803-831-7444, or www.grammarchic.net.

Email is an incredible and still-undervalued marketing tool—one that allows you to reach out to both past and potential clients directly with a personalized message and a tailored value proposition. It’s something we use for our own marketing here at Grammar Chic, Inc., and it’s something we recommend for our clients.

Sometimes, though, the best intentions for an email marketing campaign fall short, and emails are sent out without any kind of response coming back. Sometimes, email marketing just plain doesn’t work—and when that happens, it’s important to ask yourself why.

There are a number of possible reasons, but really three main ones—and today we want to look closer at each of them.

You Haven’t Segmented Your List

Email is best used in a highly targeted way, with messages being tailored to segments of your subscription list. For example, here at Grammar Chic, we have some clients for our resume writing division and other clients within our marketing wing. If we’re sending out a promotion for content marketing services, it doesn’t make as much sense to send it to the resume crew. Instead, we’d tailor it to the part of our email list that comes to us for marketing expertise.

Make sure you work with your email list to divide it and segment it into different audiences—and that your message always mirrors the people you’re sending it to.

Your Headline Doesn’t Grab Attention

This is always the struggle with email marketing: How do you grab attention and make your email stand out within busy inboxes? The headline is everything—your best and only chance at a strong first impression.

Some basic tips for writing good email headlines:

Keep it brief—seven words or less!

Avoid words that will run you afoul of spam filters—Sale, Free, 50% Off, etc.

Be clear about your value proposition; how will the reader benefit from reading your email?

You’re Not Clear in Your Value Proposition

And that brings us to the final point: Some emails don’t work because they just don’t have much to say. Everything from your headline to your body text to your call to action should spell out the value you’re offering to readers—the “what’s in it for me” of reading your message and responding to your CTA at the bottom. If your value offer is unclear, readers just won’t know what to do with your message.

These are all potentially fatal blows to your email marketing campaign, but the good news is that all of them can be corrected. The first step is to meet with the email marketing strategists at Grammar Chic, Inc. Contact us about a consultation today, either at www.grammarchic.net or 803-831-7444.

Email marketing is potentially quite rewarding, an effective way to stay in contact with clients and with leads. As with anything, though, it takes some strategy and foresight if you want to steer clear of major obstacles—and as far as email marketing goes, the most major obstacle of all is the spam filter.

Simply put: People won’t like receiving low-value, spammy emails, which is why most email programs have sophisticated algorithms to detect spam and send it directly into a separate folder—keeping inboxes clean and uncluttered. That’s good news for email users but bad news for marketers, whose well-intentioned emails may inadvertently run afoul of these spam filters.

So what can you do to keep your emails in inboxes, where they belong? Keep reading for a few practical tips.

How to Avoid Getting Your Emails Flagged as Spam

To keep out of the way of those spam filters, here’s what we recommend:

Don’t buy an email list. If you’re sending emails to people who didn’t ask for them, it’s likely that they’ll flag your messages as spam. Only send marketing emails to customers who actually opt in to your email list.

Avoid conventionally “salesy” language. Spam filters will weed out any emails that seem like they’re strictly selling something—so using subject lines with “sale” or “free” can get you in trouble. Likewise, “30% off” and all-caps subject lines are destined to get your emails discarded. Focus on providing real information and value, and describing the email contents in non-salesy terms.

Don’t send image-only emails. While some images are fine, you also want to include text. Why? Some spammers have tried to use image-only emails to outsmart spam filters, so messages that only contain images may be discarded automatically.

Provide options for unsubscribing or for receiving fewer emails. Again, if you want to avoid getting your emails flagged as spam, it’s smart to allow readers some say in the emails they receive.

Segment and personalize your emails. The more specifically you can target your message to a particular audience, the more likely it is that people will want to read it rather than mark it as spam.

Strategize Your Email Marketing

Of course, the best way to make sure your marketing emails hit their target is to consider a robust, integrated approach to content marketing—and that’s something Grammar Chic can help with. Ask us about it today. Contact the Grammar Chic team at www.grammarchic.net, or at 803-831-7444.

Here’s a phenomenon you may have noticed: During the grueling hot months of summer, you’re much more likely to get out-of-office auto-responders from the people you try to reach by e-mail. It’s not that everyone’s avoiding you. It’s just that everyone’s on vacation—or so it seems, sometimes. Certainly, the summer season is touch-and-go when it comes to emails, which may tempt you to pack in your email marketing campaign for the summer, perhaps revisiting the ol’ email list when September rolls around.

That’s not an illegitimate temptation, nor is it necessarily a wrong one: Certainly, there is an argument to be made for scaling back on your marketing emails during the summer months, if not disbanding them completely.

No matter how many marketing emails you send over the next couple of months, though—just one or a baker’s dozen—we encourage you to implement some simple tweaks to your strategy, which can make those emails much more enticing to your recipients—and thus, likely to get opened and acted upon.

Get Your Marketing Emails Ready for Summer

Keep those subject lines succinct. A lot of your readers may be getting those emails while they’re waiting in line for movie tickets, a plane ride, or a trip down a roller coaster. They don’t have time for epic-length headings. Shoot for subject lines between 30 and 50 characters—never any more.

Cozy up to emojis! Summer time is fun time, right? There’s no better season to adorn your subject lines and your email messages with a few tasteful smiley faces or other festive icons. Don’t go overboard, and don’t sacrifice actual words for emojis, but do feel free to use them as they fit.

Resist the temptation toward click bait. Drop two swimsuit sizes in a week’s time may seem like a tempting promise, and if your product can actually deliver it, then good for you! Don’t fall into the trap of making cheap promises that you know you can’t keep, though, nor of writing subject headings that aren’t actually relevant to your content. You may get click-throughs, but you’ll also get a lot of annoyed customers.

Don’t let your emails fall into the junk pile. Nobody has a lot of time to sort through their junk folder, so avoid letting your emails end up there. Cut down on spam triggers, as we talked about in this previous post.

Need some further assistance getting your marketing emails summer-ready? We can help you strategize, write, format, and send. Reach out to Grammar Chic today at 803-831-7444 or www.grammarchic.net.

Report after report and study after study suggests that email is the most effective digital marketing tool.

So if you’re not seeing much of a benefit from your email marketing program, you’ve gotta wonder why.

Maybe the reason people aren’t responding to your emails is because they aren’t even opening them in the first place. Obviously, that’s a problem. A low open rate means your email marketing strategy is dead in the water.

Your open rate is even more significant than your total subscriber number. Think about it this way: Having 1,000 subscribers who all open your emails means much more exposure for your brand than having 6,000 subscribers but only a 2 percent open rate.

No question: You’ve got to get your emails opened. And the best way to do that is to tweak your subject lines—but how?

Tip #1: Make your subject lines longer.

Both the conventional wisdom and the natural instinct is to make your subject lines short and snappy. We’ve offered that very advice in the past. But one new study suggests that maybe longer—like, 60-70 characters, if not more—is the way to go.

Perhaps the rationale is simply this: When you’re working with just a couple of words, it’s hard to offer more than salesy platitudes and generalities. But if you give yourself more space, you can actually convey value and specificity to your readers.

So maybe it’s worth trying long subject lines for a while, just to see how they work.

Tip #2: Write in all lower case letters.

All caps screams of desperation, and can be pretty annoying. Mixing upper and lower case—you know, like you would in normal, everyday writing—is fine. But consider: a lot of the emails you get from your friends and family members probably come with all lower case subject lines.

Writing an all lower case subject line can convey intimacy and familiarity, then—and that’s not such a bad thing for your brand!

Tip #3: Provide value—but don’t give everything away.

As for the actual content of your subject lines, something we recommend is focusing on the value you offer—the benefits your email will provide—without getting into the specifics.

Show your readers what’s in it for them to open your email, but not necessarily how they’ll get it.

Example: Try a subject line that promises something like this: “Drive traffic to your website… and turn it into paying customers!”

You’re showing your readers exactly what they stand to gain from reading the email—but to learn how they’re going to gain it… through SEO, email marketing, or whatever else… they’ve got to open the email and read it.

Try some of these tips in your own email marketing—and see how your open rates improve. Talk with us about it by calling 803-831-7444, or visiting www.grammarchic.net.

Email marketing can pay off big time—but only if you do it right. And obviously, if you’re spending a lot of money on emails but not getting any of them opened by your target audience—if those emails go directly from inboxes to trashcans, contents unseen—then you’re doing little more than wasting money.

So what can you do to ensure that those emails get read? We’ve shared some email marketing best practices before. Today, what we’ll offer is a set of don’ts—some common email marketing elements that are sure to get your messages promptly deleted.

In other words, these are rookie errors—boneheaded mistakes—that will basically squander whatever effort you put into your email marketing campaign. Naturally, we recommend avoiding them at all costs!

Email Elements it Pays to Avoid

Spelling and grammar errors. Yes, it sounds like common sense—but you’d be amazed at the number of business owners who take time to proof their messages but not their subject lines. If somebody receives an email from you and it’s got a glaring error in its subject heading, that immediately undercuts your authority—and all but guarantees your email gets rejected.

Impersonal greetings. Here’s something else that can wreck your subject line—and thus, your entire email: A greeting that’s obviously impersonal and unspecific. Any message that comes with a title like Dear Sir or Madam will look like spam, and likely be treated as such.

Spammy words. Along the same lines, spammy buzzwords located in your subject line will get your emails buried and your servers blacklisted. Avoid saying click here, % off, order now, sale ends at midnight—anything that clearly marks your marketing email as cheap or salesy.

Bombast. Finally: Remember that a subject line is meant to be short and snappy. If your subject line lacks brevity, it may turn off busy readers who’d rather you get straight to the point.

There is plenty you can do to make email marketing a more effective tool for your business—but also plenty you shouldn’t do. Keep these tips in mind as you strive to achieve email marketing success.

For help crafting an effective email marketing campaign, contact the Grammar Chic team at 803-831-7444, or www.grammarchic.net.

What’s the most valuable marketing asset you have at your small business? Your e-mail marketing list is, at the very least, high on the list. With your e-mail marketing list you have a database of captured leads—which is not quite the same as having a captive audience. You’ve still got to work and be strategic to get those marketing e-mails opened, read, and acted upon—a tough job, but highly advantageous if you can pull it off.

Sadly, we see a lot of small business owners who don’t pull it off, despite significant investments in e-mail marketing. They approach e-mail marketing with enthusiasm, but not necessarily with proven strategies—and this can lead to some fatal errors.

Don’t Believe the Hype

For instance: Most small business owners know that the headline is all-important. If you want your marketing e-mails to have any effect, you need them to get read, which means including an attention-grabbing headline.

But there is such a thing as overhyping it. Ridiculous, Buzzfeed-style headlines are too readily associated with spammy marketing techniques; when you include a headline that promises earth-shattering results, that calls the integrity of the product into question.

Good headlines are short, snappy, and focused on value, but they’re also honest and not overblown.

Make it Personal

Another common problem: Small business owners get so carried away in e-mail automation that they forget to include a personal touch.

For example: Do your marketing e-mails arrive from “admin” or “noreply”—or do you have an actual name in the Sender field?

And do they conclude with a personal signoff from your owner, marketing director, or CEO?

Remember that people like to interact with other people; an e-mail from “noreply” is hardly an invitation for further engagement.

Give Something Away

Another sign of e-mail marketing overzealousness: Marketing e-mails that announce company news or promote products but don’t actually offer something of value. Remember to ask yourself this about any e-mail you send: What’s in it for your customers?

We had a client recently who wanted to send an e-mail announcing his company’s new website. If your only hook is hey, we have a new website, don’t be surprised if nobody particularly cares. But if you can position that website as an invaluable resource for your customers—now you’ve got something.

The bottom line: E-mail marketing isn’t just a matter of passion. It’s a matter of careful thought. Grammar Chic, Inc. has plenty of experience building winsome e-mail marketing campaigns. To learn more, contact us today at www.grammarchic.net or 803-831-7444.

Grammar Chic, Inc. is a full-service content writing company that publishes The Red Ink, a collection of informative articles pertaining to professional editing and writing services, writing and editing techniques, and brand management tactics. For more information about Grammar Chic, Inc. and the services that it offers visit www.grammarchic.net.